This weekend, Dave Slusher expressed frustration in trying to explain why most of the arguments related to money in podcasting seem to miss the point. I wrote what was originally going to be a 140 character Twitter post (no, I will not use the tw**t word) that ended up being 2 longish emails instead.

He thought it was worth sharing with others and said so. I try to minimize the amount of meta, "blogosphere" stuff on this site. That whole frothy, new media world where everyone has accounts on Flickr, Twitter and Facebook , subscribes to podcasts and hangs on every word from Steve Jobs' mouth is just something that I don't have much interest in.

So, I gave him the go-ahead to put it up on his site. In case you're curious, you can read it here.

Hey folks. It's been a long couple of days. Starting early on Monday, all of the sites on this server started having what first appeared to be MySQL problems. However, upon investigation, it was actually that MySQL couldn't get a lock on some files on the filesystem. That, in turn, ended up being caused by a hard drive failure.

Between mid day Monday and early this morning, lots of effort went into getting the hard drive replaced, the data restored, MySQL cooperating again and all of the sites back online.

Now, at 5:30am, things look like they're back to square. Unfortunately, the server was down for much longer than the normal SMTP timeout, so if you sent me email in the last couple of days, you probably got a bounced response (even if it's just in your spam folder), so you should re-send it to me or send it to jwynia@gmail.com just in case.

Sorry if it caused any inconvenience for anyone out there.

At about 5:00 tonight, this server went AWOL. Nothing on he web side, no responses to pings, no DNS resolution, etc. What was particularly scary was that I also couldn't reach the support pages necessary to submit a trouble ticket. Being prone to an active imagination, I was suddenly envisioning my server admin packing up and shuttering the service.

Of course, that was unfounded, as was revealed when I got through. It was little more than a network switch going out and rendering everything behind it isolated from the greater network.

Things are now back up and running. Let me know if you see leftover problems.

In the past few days, quite a few people have tipped their hats, grabbed their coats and waved good-bye to membership in 9rules:

• brokenkode.com
• h3h.net
  seopher.com

• danlockton.co.uk
• www.standardsforlife.com
• baires.elsur.org
• www.i-marco.nl

As those posts trickled out, a couple of people emailed me asking about my involvement in 9rules. That's because in December of 2006, I posted that this site was added to the 9rules network.

I submitted this site because the network was made up of high quality *sites* full of interesting content. I will admit that it was at least in part an attempt to validate that this site fit into that category.

The focus, as far as I could tell from the outside, was on the sites. To apply for membership, you don't submit yourself (i.e. with an email address), you must submit a specific site.

However, after getting the thumbs up, I discovered that there was also a "clubhouse" forum for members. For a few weeks, I stopped in every few days. There were some good conversations, but nothing that was interesting enough to overcome my aversion to forums.

I get that lots of people really dig forums and all of the social, "chatty" features of modern social networking sites. I just tend not to get involved in or excited about those aspects. I've come to see it as just another personality difference.

If I have an idea worth sharing, I put it up here or on one of my other public feeds. The same is true if I have a reaction to something online or an opinion about something. It's entirely up for and open to the public. Anyone who's interested can read AND respond to my ideas.

Forums, particularly closed-off private ones, do not do that. By design, they limit participation in the conversation to those who've been screened and deemed worthy.

After that initial few weeks, my involvement in the forum tapered off. It did, indeed, feel like the clubhouse it's name predicts. No big deal, I thought. After all, the network is about quality content on a bunch of sites, right?

While it may have been once, it clearly isn't anymore:

"If you feel you are contributing by your entries being shown, 9rules is no longer a good fit for you…"

Ironically enough, it appears that the decision to require participation in the clubhouse, took *place* in the clubhouse, pretty much self-selecting population essentially banishing those who aren't present to argue.

To me, this whole medium is about opening up the channels of communication and for expressing oneself. I thought that recognizing those sites that fostered that by virtue of high quality content was what the 9rules network represented.

Clearly not.

Personally, the point is probably moot as I didn't actually get the email in question. That's because I was apparently dropped from the network at some time between July 1 and July 6 of this year and didn't notice.

I don't recall seeing any notification or requesting that I step it up in the forums. That's not to say that one wasn't sent. It's entirely possible that one was sent, but caught in my spam filters.

Regardless, when I redesigned this site, I apparently had already stopped actively considering this site part of the network as I forgot to put the logo in the template. Of course, that happened on the 10th, with a couple of posts in between that were posted before the theme switch, but not included in 9rules aggregation.

So, while I didn't actually have to make the choice this week to let this site remain in the network or not (as it was apparently made for me back in July), if I *had*, I would have certainly taken this opportunity to remove it.

It's sad to watch a community put up walls and pull activity inside those walls in the *pursuit of* community.

We're only about a week away from our exchange student, Laurin arriving. I wanted to write about that whole experience, and invite him to join me in talking about the experience. However, I don't want that to take over this site, or to radically shift the focus and rhythm here (which I like).

So, this is just a quick note to point to a separate Wordpress install I set up to talk about the cultural exchange we're going to be experiencing.

If you're interested in what the year hosting an exchange student is like, head on over. Otherwise, it'll probably only show up here when it makes sense.